About

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher who writes for both popular and scholarly audiences on the topics of consciousness, anomalous experience, ethics, and spirituality. She is also the founder and director of the Mind & Meaning Institute.

Sharon earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2008 and was Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethics at Brandeis University from 2008 to 2010. Her first book, The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness, was published in 2016, and is a scholarly treatise on the topic of metaethics: i.e., whether there are objective truths in ethics and, if so, how we come to know what they are.

Soon after leaving academia for a career as an independent writer and researcher, Sharon became interested in the phenomenon of “coincidence” or “synchronicity”: strange, enigmatic experiences that aren’t blatantly paranormal but that seem so improbably meaningful that they make us wonder whether something more than chance lies behind them. Her May 2019 book, The Source and Significance of Coincidences, presents a wealth of evidence concerning the statistical importance of coincidences, their range of possible causes, and how we can best interpret their implications for our lives.

In November 2021, Sharon was named a runner-up in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest for her essay “Beyond Death.” This essay, available for free on the BICS website as well as in paperback, on Kindle, and as an audiobook, summarizes and analyzes the best evidence for life after death collected over the last 150 years.

Sharon writes about coincidences and other topics on her Psychology Today blog, Mysteries of Consciousness, and has presented her research at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. She is a supporting researcher for the International Centre for Reincarnation Research and recently founded the Mind & Meaning Institute, which is dedicated to promoting scientific and philosophical research on the deepest questions raised by human experience.

Sharon’s current research is very theoretically focused. She’s writing a new work of academic philosophy in which she presents an alternative to the reigning physicalist, mechanistic paradigm, an alternative based on the direct causal efficacy of intrinsic value. Its working title is “Qualia & Nonlocality.”

On a more personal note, in May 2020, Sharon published a memoir—The Supreme Victory of the Heart—about her first encounters with meaningful coincidence, which happened in the difficult months after her French fiancé told her about an old flame who had come back into his life. She has also written several personal essays on the topics of relationships, spirituality, and the environment, which have appeared in Salon and Orion, among other places. While she now lives back in the rural area of eastern Virginia where she grew up, she spent almost all of her 20s elsewhere: getting a PhD in philosophy at New York University, falling in love in Paris, teaching philosophy at Brandeis University outside Boston, and living on a 200-year-old retired dairy farm in Brittany, France. All of these experiences have found their way into her writing, in one way or another.

If you’d like to contact Sharon, please email her at sharon.rawlette[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also find her on Academia.edu. Or follow her through her Amazon author page.

If you are looking for Sharon’s book design business, you’ll find it at SHR Book Design.